Bones of the Buried

by David Roberts

  Edward persevered: ‘The bloodstained clothes – were they Godfrey’s?’

  ‘No, they belonged . . . to that man, but they thought the blood was his. He must have . . . got it on himself when he . . . when he stabbed . . . Oh! How can people be so wicked, Lord Edward?’

  ‘Were the embassy people helpful?’

  ‘Oh yes, the ambassador was very sympathetic and he gave us a nice young man to look after us while we were in Madrid.’

  ‘Would that have been Tom Sutton by any chance?’

  ‘Why yes! Do you know him?’

  At that moment the door of the drawing-room opened and an elderly, straight-backed man with a military moustache entered the room. He put out his hand to the grieving mother and looked at Edward reproachfully.

  ‘What is it, Rosemary, my dear?’

  ‘Oh, Henry, this is an old school friend of Godfrey’s, Lord Edward Corinth. He has been abroad – in America, did you say, Lord Edward? – and has only just heard.’

  ‘Lord Edward,’ said Henry Tilney, ‘it is very kind of you to call but you can see we are not in the way of being . . . sociable. You were a friend of my son at Eton?’

  ‘He was a little older than me – two or three years and of course that sort of age difference means quite a lot to schoolboys, but I think I can say we were friends. We weren’t in the same house but we played squash together – that sort of thing. I was very surprised and saddened to hear about your loss.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man miserably. ‘He was our only son and we had such high hopes . . . but there we are. We should not build . . .’ His words tailed off as if the effort of speaking was too great.

  ‘If I remember, Mr Tilney, you were a Member of Parliament – a Conservative – but Godfrey . . . from what I understand he was . . . he was on the left?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tilney, smiling wanly. ‘I was MP for Marylebone – retired at the last election, but yes, I’m afraid we did not see eye to eye politically. Godfrey was a lawyer, you know. He was very concerned with issues of social justice. Got mixed up with that chap D.F. Browne, do you know who I mean? Can’t stand the fellow myself. Anyway, he – Godfrey – suddenly got the idea that he was needed to help . . . what do they call it now – you know the alliance of left-wing parties . . .?’

  ‘The Popular Front.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Though why he wanted to go to Spain when there was more than enough for him to do here, or so I should suppose, I don’t know.’

  ‘Might I ask, sir, was Godfrey a member of the Communist Party?’

  ‘Of course not!’ broke in Rosemary Tilney angrily as though Edward was accusing her son of being a criminal. ‘He was just devoted to . . . he wanted justice . . . and this was his reward. Is that justice, Lord Edward? Is it justice that he was murdered for no reason at all?’

  As Edward left the gloomy house permeated by grief, he could not but feel that their mourning was tinged with guilt. Perhaps all parents feel guilt if their child dies before they do; it is against the law of nature. Or was it that they were blaming themselves for not having understood what their only son was trying to do with his life? The father must have thought his son had spat in his face by rejecting his own political values so comprehensively and it was no good trying to tell him that most children rebelled against their fathers.

  The anguish of loss: Edward knew something of the pain felt by parents when their children predeceased them. His eldest brother, Franklyn, had died in the first week of the war and his father had never come to terms with the tragedy. He had been in a very real sense a prisoner of war. Gerald, Edward’s other brother, who had succeeded as Duke of Mersham, had never been forgiven by his father for surviving while the favourite son had not. It had caused a fracturing of relationships in the family from which everyone had suffered. Edward, very much the youngest of the three brothers, had, in effect, grown up fatherless because the old Duke had gone into a depression from which nothing could stir him except death itself.

  One thing was certain: it would have been worse than useless to ask the Tilneys to plead for Griffiths-Jones’ life. If he had suggested it, he would have been thrown out of the house. It was better to keep their goodwill so he could go back to them at some future time if he needed their help. Mr Tilney had obviously been puzzled at the absence of any apparent motive for his son’s murder and it puzzled Edward too. What reason had Griffiths-Jones, or anyone else for that matter, to murder Godfrey Tilney? Griffiths-Jones was one of the most determined and committed political animals he had ever met and to be behind bars now, just when the new government was taking control of the country, must be, to put it mildly, frustrating. He suspected Griffiths-Jones of being utterly ruthless in pursuit of his ambitions and he was quite ready to believe that he would kill without remorse if he needed to, but to muck up a murder so as to end up in front of a firing squad seemed out of character. He was too efficient to leave evidence all over the place, as he was alleged to have done. No, no, no! Edward was quite ready to believe David Griffiths-Jones capable of murder – capable of murdering him even – but not of making a hash of it.

  It was an odd way of proving someone innocent but the more Edward considered the matter, the more he felt Verity was right, if for all the wrong reasons. For Verity, her lover was a saint – if the Communist Party had saints – battling tyranny and incapable of anything shoddy or underhand. Edward believed he knew that was nonsense. He had just a few days to try and prove to an indifferent world that the man condemned to death for murdering Godfrey Tilney was guilty of much but not this. He doubted he could do it but, for Verity’s sake, he was determined to try. As for blackmailing Griffiths-Jones into becoming a police spy for Basil Thoroughgood, it was just as likely he could turn water into wine but he had to pretend it was a possibility if he was to have Foreign Office help in getting a stay of execution. There would be no point in finding out who really had killed Godfrey Tilney if Griffiths-Jones had already been tied to a stake, blindfolded and shot.

  3

  Bragg was a piratical figure with only one eye, the other being covered by a black patch. He also boasted a wooden foot. It was a miracle he could fly at all. In the last days of the war he had almost been killed in a dog fight over the outskirts of Albert. A splinter of wood had entered his eye blinding him immediately and causing him almost unbearable pain. Somehow, with extraordinary fortitude, he had managed to land the aircraft before losing consciousness, but his foot had been trapped in the fuselage and had had to be amputated. He ought to have died of blood poisoning or the sheer pain of his wounds but he survived and even learnt to fly again, though, as Edward knew, it could be a frightening experience for his passengers.

  Edward had picked up Verity from Holland Park shortly after five o’clock. By the time they got to Croydon – the Lagonda had made good time on the empty roads – it was getting light. It was perishing cold and Verity looked very small buried under a tartan rug and a huge ulster Edward had brought for her. She wore a black beret, a long woollen scarf round her neck and heavy leather gauntlets. Edward was aware they had a lot to talk about. There was so little he knew about the circumstances of her life in Spain. How well did she know Tilney? What was his relationship with Griffiths-Jones? Was one of them senior to the other in the Party? Because, whatever his parents believed, Verity confirmed that he was an active communist. Who else might have wanted Tilney dead? Lots of questions, but somehow he knew that, today at least, he would never ask them. Not having seen Verity for six months made him shy or even guilty – guilty that he had not missed her more. It was ridiculous, he knew, but he felt he had been idling his life away in an unreal world of luxury and artifice while she had been roughing it in the real world, making a name for herself as a journalist to whom people listened. Perhaps it wasn’t guilt he felt but envy.

  In any case, it was too early and much too cold to ask and answer questions. It was enough to ride in silence through the Surrrey countryside with this feisty, gallant girl besid
e him, for once silent, vulnerable and trusting. She was so different from the girls he had met as a young man in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Eaton Square, waiting complacently or apathetically to be selected for breeding by one of the arrogant males before whom they paraded. Even then the ‘deb’s delights’, as the men were called, had referred to ‘the season’ as a cattle market and had made jokes about the mothers who chaperoned their girls with such terrible determination.

  They had the hood up over the tonneau and Verity snuggled up to him and fell fast asleep, making it difficult for Edward to change gear without waking her. In her sleep she occasionally shivered, whether from the cold or because of her dreams, he could not say. He felt unutterably happy.

  Croydon aerodrome was not much more than a cluster of hangars around a tarmacked runway. The one building of character was the control tower and there they found Harry Bragg already prepared for take-off. He fed them hot black coffee and bacon sandwiches to keep out the cold. ‘Good to see you, Corinth. Last time must have been two years ago in Mombasa, eh?’ The two men shook hands, more or less ignoring Verity, in Bragg’s case out of shyness. Since his disfigurement, he felt he was repulsive to look at. Verity, still in something of a trance, did not seem to notice him at all. ‘The weather looks set fair,’ Bragg said. His voice was a little slurred, not because of drink, though he and Edward both had flasks of brandy with them, but because of his war injury. ‘It’s going to be cold, old lad – and noisy. This old bus is a goer – no question of that – one of the fastest in the sky but she’s noisy and she leaks. Know what I mean?’ He grinned. Edward knew what he meant – it was going to be very cold.

  Bragg was curious about why his old friend was being whisked off to Madrid in an aeroplane instead of the usual train journey across France but he knew better than to ask. Lord Weaver had given him his instructions in person but had told him nothing except that he was to deliver Verity, the New Gazette’s Spanish correspondent, and Lord Edward Corinth to Madrid with all possible despatch and then return to London to await further orders. Now all he said was, ‘We won’t be able to talk much on the flight but I will indicate like this if there is anything I think you ought to see.’ He waved his gauntlet-covered hands first in one direction and then in the other.

  They took off into a gun-metal sky. Verity was awake now but, as Bragg had warned them, the de Havilland Dragon Rapide was too noisy to make conversation possible. At first they flew low over green fields and Edward could see farm workers stare up at them in surprise. Aeroplanes were still objects of wonder when most people never travelled faster than a horse could gallop or went further than their local market town in a lifetime. They gained height over the grey, cold Channel and once again Verity seemed to sleep but Edward was now wide-awake, his brain racing with questions only time could answer. Always, he was aware of the irony: Verity was depending on him to save her lover from a death he probably richly deserved and whose presence in her life he deplored.

  They refuelled in Bordeaux and again, just before they crossed the border, at Saint Jean de Luz. The moment they flew into Spain the weather worsened. As they crept over the harsh terrain – almost a desert – Verity began to feel excited and rather scared and wondered what she would do if she had to pee. Unlike Edward, she had not flown in an aeroplane before and it satisfied her yearning for urgent action even if in the long run it was fruitless. It was bringing her back quickly to where she wanted most in the world to be but, though she would never admit it to Edward or anyone else, she felt that flying was an unnatural way to travel. Perhaps if she learned to fly herself, she thought, she would feel differently.

  Soon they were over the Sierra de la Demanda and the little aeroplane seemed to chug and shuffle over the snow-peaked mountain tops as if some immense magnet was drawing them earthward, to be spiked like an unwanted document on one of the razor-sharp pinnacles of rock. At Burgos, they landed again and refuelled the ‘old gel’, as Bragg called his steed, for the last time. As Edward and Verity stuffed themselves with sugary buns washed down by scalding black coffee, they exchanged small talk, somehow not wanting to consider the real business of their flight across Europe. The final hop to Madrid’s splendid new Barajas airport was made in bright sunlight but to Edward’s disappointment it was still very cold. He had been longing to bask in Spanish warmth but apparently Madrid in February could be as cold as England. As they circled the two steel-and-glass control buildings, Verity gripped Edward’s hand. Her courage had all but left her during the long, exhausting flight. They were here at last but what could they hope to achieve? David was doomed and Edward had as much as told her so. But oddly enough, as Verity’s spirits had sunk, Edward’s had risen. As they landed, they could see beyond a huge hangar the solitary figure of a tall woman, standing immobile beside a motor car. Only the long silk scarf round her neck fluttering behind her in the wind gave any life to the picture.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he shouted to Verity over the roar of the engines.

  ‘That’s Hester, Hester Lengstrum. We share an apartment. She’s a Swedish baroness.’

  This was the first Edward had heard of Hester Lengstrum but there was no time to ask further questions. They landed with a bump, rolling across the grass right up to the stationary automobile. Harry helped them down. It was good to feel solid earth beneath their feet but they were both very stiff and Verity stumbled. She felt light-headed from spinning through the ether but she got out her ‘thank you’ to Harry Bragg before turning to greet her friend.

  As Edward said goodbye to Harry, he watched Verity’s friend out of the corner of his eye. She was a striking girl, about twenty-five he guessed, with long black hair flowing down her back which she shrugged now and again almost as if she wanted to be sure it was still there. She was tall, tall as himself, and he was six foot. Verity had to stand on tiptoe to kiss her. It had often amused him how much Verity hated being small; to her annoyance, she was just five foot three or, as he said, five-four when angry. Edward liked the way Hester held herself: straight as a guardsman, as if she scorned trying to disguise her height by leaning forward, as he had seen many tall people do. She was cool responding to Verity’s puppy-ish embraces, a calm smile and a toss of her hair saying as much as she wanted about her pleasure in having her back. He guessed she was naturally economical with her smiles and grinned inwardly. She might add interest to his investigations, he thought.

  ‘I’ll wait to hear from you,’ said Harry, smeared with oil and grease. He had taken off his goggles which had left him with owlish white rings round his eyes. ‘I have to go back to London as you know but I can be here or wherever else you command in twenty-four hours. The boss said you only had to telegraph him and he would rub his Aladdin’s lamp and, hey presto, I would appear to do your bidding.’

  It cheered Edward to know that the aviator would be able to pluck them out of danger if it became necessary. He was not in his element here. His Spanish was rudimentary, though he could speak French fluently so supposed he ought, fairly quickly, to be able to learn enough Spanish to get by. He knew no one in Madrid and did not know how the authorities would react to a foreigner without any official status trying to interfere with the course of justice – or rather he could guess: they would either ignore him, which was the most likely, or push him out of the country if he was too annoying. And then there was the politics: he knew himself to be as innocent as a babe as far as Spanish politics were concerned and, if Tilney’s proved to be a political murder, as he suspected it was, he might very well put Verity and himself in danger by some ignorant remark or false assumption.

  Carrying their bags, Edward walked over to Hester Lengstrum who held out her hand to him. ‘So, I guess you must be Captain Marvel,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth. Verity, Edward saw, was blushing prettily.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of Hester, Edward, she likes to shock. She wants to see if you mind.’

  ‘No offence, honey, but you have gone on so about Lord Edward,’ she emph
asised the ‘Lord’ ironically, ‘it’s quite a relief to see he’s a human being after all.’

  ‘And you’re American,’ said Edward, deliberately sounding disappointed. He dropped his bag and took Hester’s hand. ‘You were supposed to be a Swedish baroness. I’d rather hoped for a Viking.’

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid I’m no Garbo. I was married to a Swedish baron, I guess I still am, and it’s certainly useful to be a baroness in Spain – even Republican Spain. But I’m as American as stars and bars, Lord Edward, as I guess you can hear – from Denver, Colorado.’

  ‘How is he?’ Verity asked, impatient of badinage.

  ‘David? He’s OK, I guess, that is, considering his situation.’

  ‘Did he have any message for me?’

  ‘No. He seemed to think you were wasting your time though – bringing over Captain Marvel. I don’t know what you did to him,’ she said turning to Edward, ‘but he doesn’t seem to rate you highly. I’ve gotten the impression he thinks you’ve got the hots for his girl.’

  Verity blushed. ‘Oh, that’s nonsense, Hester. I can’t think what gave you that idea.’

  ‘OK, hon. But it’s not my idea, it’s David’s. Maybe it’s just he’s given up hope, but when I said you were bringing your friend to see him tomorrow morning, he didn’t seem to be particularly interested.’

  Verity looked vexed and Edward bit his lip. He doubted very much if there was anything he could do for David Griffiths-Jones in his terrible predicament and he feared it might look as though he had come to Madrid to gloat. Whatever Verity might choose to believe, Edward had no illusions: he and David were oil and water. They had disliked each other at Cambridge and, when Verity had brought them together last year, their mutual antipathy had hardened into settled enmity. David saw him, he knew, as a playboy, a drone, a member of a caste he was dedicated to destroying. Edward saw him as the worst kind of bigot, and Verity complicated the whole thing.